Gorilla (Remastered)

Released mere months after Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band shook the popular music scene to its core, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's Gorilla turned the whole pop culture thing on its head. 1967 saw music at something of a counter culture cross roads. While 'the kids' had spent recent years embracing The Beatles, beat groups, the Brit-Blues movement, folk-pop and primitive psychedelia, the radio-waves were still dominated by jazz, cosy MOR and what can only charitably be referred to as easy listening, ostensibly the music of 'the kids' parents. Even before Sgt Pepper The Beatles had been making a number of nods to music hall, but it took the Bonzos to lampoon the trad-jazz nostalgia nonsense in a way that made sense to 'the kids'.

From the opening skronks of "Cool Britannia", a phrase hijacked for horrific purposes in the mid-90s, Gorilla is an album that exists partly in its own sealed off universe, as it paints dioramas of musical grotesques, while simultaneously having it's finger on the cultural pulse in a way that no other album of the era managed to, simply by acknowledging that pop music was not the only kind of music out there. Sometimes the individual songs on Gorilla are so absolutely on the nose that they can actually come across as at best misjudged, and at worst mean-spirited and of questionable taste (though the worst offender, "Look Out, There's a Monster Coming", does at least poke fun at the obsession with external image and needless cosmetic surgery that has become ridiculously commonplace in the fifty years since the song was featured on Gorilla). Equally there are tracks where things land in elegant fashion, such as "Jazz (Delicious Hot!, Disgusting Cold)", "The Equestrian Statue" and "Music for the Head Ballet", however they have become a little less celebrated than other numbers on Gorilla. "Death Cab for Cutie" is a number that some will recognise, as it was memorably performed on the Magical Mystery Tour film, and provided a name to a bunch of American rockers. Elsewhere, "Jollity Farm" and "Mickey's Son and Daughter" were covers, which although approached with musical gusto, were tonally at odds with much of what was going on.